


That is where she ought to live, with bears, not with men

by lotesseflower (lotesse)



Category: His Dark Materials - Pullman
Genre: Folklore, Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-23
Updated: 2009-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-05 03:02:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesseflower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She stood darkly golden against the permafrost, taller and more world-weary than she'd been when he'd last seen her. Wrapping her into the rough embrace of his fur, he breathed in her heady wild scent, atavistically satisfied by her returned presence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That is where she ought to live, with bears, not with men

**Author's Note:**

  * For [echoinautumn (maybetwice)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/gifts).



When Lyra Silvertongue returned to Iorek Byrnison, after the end and the beginning of the world, he saw marks of sorrow and love and deception and catastrophe on her face. The boy with the Knife was gone, and the Bear could see the empty air where he ought to have stood. It shimmered just beside the girl with the now-settled pine marten daemon, an absence so strong as to be nearly material.

He mourned the loss of the boy, who he'd respected as he'd respected few men in his time, but his concern was with the face of the girl. He met her at the gate of Svalbard. He'd been waiting for her for many days, and the small life of his ice-bound kingdom had given him news of her passage. She stood darkly golden against the permafrost, taller and more world-weary than she'd been when he'd last seen her. Wrapping her into the rough embrace of his fur, he breathed in her heady wild scent, atavistically satisfied by her returned presence. She clung to his neck, fingernails nipping through his fur like cubs' claws, tiny pinpricks of her need.

Later, when he'd wrapped her in long furs and settled her near to a roaring fire, when her eyes were sleepy and her sadness was dulled somewhat by physical comfort, he said to her, "There is a human word for a great warrior, _berserker,_ which is a reference to my kind, to the panserbjørn. Men who first encountered us in battle believed that we were in truth other men, given both prowess and madness through the donning of a bear skin. These men called such a thing a _ber sark,_ a bear shirt. They did not believe that we could be both reasonable and animal, and so said that we were the one wearing the skin of the other. But that is not the case; an Armored Bear is not merely a man wearing an animal's flesh. We are creature and mind, bound in one."

She blinked at him, unspeaking, and her eyes glinted palely in the light. The skin around them was smudged and dark, and he knew that she had wept often of late. Her Pantalaimon was snuggled closely at her back, protecting the fragile hollow curvature of her spine. "I en't ever going to see him again," Lyra said, sliding into the malformed flat-vowelled grammar she'd used as a small child. He regarded her, not speaking to her of his discovery that, though she spoke of a woman's heartbreak, she used the language of a girl. But as he watched her, the huge white bear solemnly gazing at the tousle-haired, inelegant human, he also understood that she would never be that child again, though she might sometimes speak through the mask of her voice. Her daemon had settled, and she had felt passionate love.

"I spoke to you of the false legend of the _ber sark_ because you must now come to understand, Lyra Silvertongue, that the memory and the vision are inseparable. Know that your nature is truly uncuttable, that your reason and your heart and your yearning for the wild places of the world are bound together in the knot of your spirit. Know that, just as I must be both beast and mind, giving no improper favor to either end of the balance, so too must you be godslayer and first mother united together."

As he spoke, she came to him, quiet and graceful, balancing herself with her hands against the fire-warmed walls of his palace of stone and iron. Her mouth saw compressed in grief, and he could see a banked rage starting to glimmer at the edges of her eyes. She ran a delicate fingertip around the cruel edge of one of his great dewclaws, exposed as he sat."They took him from me," she said harshly. "They used us, and then they took him."

"They did not," he rumbled. "He had to leave. It is a different matter. You have been hurt, little Silvertongue, but not wronged. And so you can heal, and take up your _ber sark_ once more. For you too wear a wild skin, and that skin is a part of your nature. You cannot deny it, nor yield yourself entirely up to it."

She sat now beside him, and leaned her head against the broad expanse of his back, pressing her neck and throat and cheek against his coat. And she was girl and woman and body and beast, suspended there between the firelight and the stone.


End file.
